Marvel doesn’t plan to publish any more CrossGen titles, with SVP of Publishing Tom Brevoort stating on Formspring that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Route 666 (due out in December and February, respectively) “have been shelved for the time being”.

I suspect no one’s surprised, since as Graeme reports (in a link no longer available), the final issue of the Mystic revival sold about 6,000 copies (estimated). Before that, there were Ruse and Sigil, which came out beginning a year ago. All were fine books for what they were, but who needs a short miniseries these days that’s not firmly tied to an existing successful property?

The books would have done better from someone other than Marvel, I suspect. A big company has big expectations and costs. And if you’re looking for something out of their ordinary superheroes — the CrossGen books were mysteries, pirate comics, and stories of magical girls — you can find that elsewhere, put out by a publisher who’s much more dedicated to the work.

It was unclear who the audience for these books was supposed to be, since Marvel turned off those new to CrossGen by emphasizing the return of the previous brands while annoying CrossGen fans by rebooting everything. There really wasn’t any point to this, except maybe to retain trademarks. Or, as Heidi speculates, “Disney overspent an insane amount of money for the Crossgen library, and this was the last attempt to get some return on that.”

At least Brevoort uses Formspring. It’s casual and odd to get news that way, but without it, mention of the series would have likely just faded away, with no one remembering the once-announced plans.

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6 Responses to “CrossGen Dies Again”

I’d have been up for a Peter Milligan spy comic. That seems to play to his strengths.

I don’t know if I’d say they spent an *insane* amount of money. They bought all of their IP for $1M. They did produce quite a lot of series in the 3-4 years they were around. I want to say 15-20 per month at their highest production level? If just one property became a modest Disney-scale success in just one medium, they’d probably make their money back on the whole deal. The bankruptcy trustee shouldn’t have just let it be sold off for peanuts.

Kudos indeed to Marvel responding directly to customer feedback in that way. They do have a history of editors being very available online.

Mystic was a good read, but honestly other than names it had nothing to do with CG. It was the equal of the news of the Buffy TVS movie that was going to have no involvement from Whedon or any of the characters from tv show.

That is such a bummer. As an old Cross Gen fan I did enjoy the three series’ they put out for the most part, but then, I wasn’t expecting a continuation of the previous stories. Except for Ruse, which I did feel some disappointment about.

Mystic did a good job of keeping the spirit of that title, and by the end I wanted to see more from that world. The same with Sigil. Oh well.

I always wanted to like Ruse more than I did, because I wanted a straight mystery comic with new Holmes-like stories. When it got into the battles and supernatural stuff, I wasn’t as interested. Is it fair to compare Marvel owning CrossGen to DC owning WildStorm? That there’s really no point, except for eliminating competition? That’s probably more applicable to Marvel owning Malibu.